Dodge Will Officially Kill the Dart Later This Month

Although we've known that its days were numbered for a while, FCA officials confirmed to C/D today that production of the Dodge Dart will come to a halt "sometime in September 2016" and there will be no 2017 models. As had been reported in Automotive News, the announcement comes as part of an evolving product strategy at the carmaker. A replacement model has not been named.

The demise of the Dart, assembled at the maker's Belvidere, Illinois, facility, clears the way for Dodge to play to its strengths in the North American market, primarily by building more expensive and thus profitable Jeep and Ram models. Only 34,500 Darts were sold through the first eight months of 2016, a little less than half the number sold over the same period in the previous year.

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The Illinois plant will build the Jeep Cherokee, instead. Similarly, production of the Chrysler 200, assembled at FCA's factory in Sterling Heights, Michigan, will come to an end in December 2016. That suburban Detroit facility (hence the "Imported from Detroit" marketing push) will be retooled to produce the updated 2018 Ram 1500.

FCA has not ruled out the possibility of having the Dart and 200 assembled by a partner or under contract by another manufacturer. Currently, Mazda assembles the Fiat 124 Spider, and the ProMaster City is a joint-venture vehicle that is also sold as an Opel in Europe and as a Vauxhall in the U.K.

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Chrysler had high aspirations for the Dart when it made its debut at the 2012 Detroit auto show as a 2013 model, hoping it would strike a chord in the densely populated and and highly competitive compact segment. We just hoped it wouldn't tarnish the Dart's nerd-chic legacy. Ultimately, it failed to do either.